Suppose you found yourself in a room full of women, all of whom
resembled Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch
of the West, Phyllis Diller, the standup comedian, Madeleine Albright,
Bill Clinton's vile Secretary of State, Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's First
Lady, or Nancy Kulp, who played the banker's secretary on The Beverly
Hillbillies.

Make that "all but one": one of the women in the room is Lexa
Doig, who played the title role on the science fiction TV series
Andromeda, and has appeared from time to time on Stargate SG1, as
well.

Lexa Doig

Now suppose that all the men in the room were going completely
overboard, extolling over and over the classic looks of Margaret,
Phyllis, Madeleine, Eleanor, and Nancy, while never even mentioning
Lexa, arguably one of the most beautiful females ever to appear on
television.

You'd think there was something wrong, right?

Seriously wrong.

All of which will give you a pretty fair idea of the frustration I
feel with regard to the current price of gasoline, the various "fixes"
being proposed for it, and a genuine solution nobody wants to talk
about.

We've been over all this before, of course.

Far from being in short supply, petroleum is the second most
abundant liquid on Earth. Contrary to what most peopleapparently
including American oil company executivesbelieve, petroleum does
not come from dead prehistoric animals and plants. Instead, it comes
from "abiotic"non-biologicalprocesses constantly occurring
under extreme temperatures and pressures deep within the Earth's
crust.

There are several ways to demonstrate this. For one thing, 70
percent of the asteroids orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter
contain a substance called "kerogen" (it's what makes chondrites
carbonaceous) more or less identical to the stuff that makes ordinary
shale oil shale. Last time I looked, there are not now, nor have there
ever been, any dead prehistoric animals or plants in the Asteroid
Belt.

A more practical proof of the abiotic origin of petroleum is the
fact that Russia, which was one of the largest importers of oil a
generation ago, has become one of the world's largest oil exporters,
following the theories of Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, and French
chemist Marcellin Berthelot. Instead of looking where traditional
geology says to look for oil, the Russians are drilling where the
abiotic theory says to drill. And they're bringing in one gusher after
another.

So much so that they figure they'll be unscathed by the coming
economic collapse everywhere else, from the United States to mainland
China.

Meanwhile, old, "depleted" oil fields that have largely been
abandoned under the "dead dinosaur" theory now appear to be filling up
againfrom belowwhich is entirely consistent with the abiotic
theory. Although I've heard oil company geologists deny it, these oil
fields have names and known locations. For further information, I
strongly suggest that you read Thomas Gold's 1999 book The Deep Hot
Biosphere, or check out the archived writings of George Crispin on
LewRockwell.com.

My point is that, whatever else is said and done about the price
of gas, it has absolutely nothing to do with scarcity. Libertarians
and conservative have long observed that starving people in the Third
World are not starving because there's any lack of food on the planet.
They're starving because governments, usually operating on insane
political and economic theories, are getting in the waysometimes
deliberatelyof getting food to the people who need it. People who,
if their economies were disenslaved, would have no trouble paying for
it.

With regard to petroleum, we get to be starving Third Worldersthe
American Productive Classliving on a planet virtually aswim
with "black gold", yet blocked by stupid, crazy, or evil politicians,
bureaucrats, and cops from doing the simple things we need to do to
survive.

There are thousands of years worth of proven oil, gas, and coal
reserves beneath the soil of the United States. Yet they have been
rendered unreachable by laws, regulations, unions, pressure groups,
and other miscreant factors that shouldn't have anything to do with
it.

(Environmentalists, who not-so-secretly loathe themselves and
their own species and yearn for a mass die-off of humanity, should be
told that they are perfectly free to go live in mud hut and croak,
decades early, of some disease nobody's heard of for 500 years, but
they will be denied the power to force that kind of life on anybody
else.)

And, of course, much of the apparent escalation of the price of
petroleum actually reflects a steep decline in the value of the US
dollar. Since Pinky and the Brain took over, it's fallen to the price
of a bus token, and it takes a lot of bus tokens to buy a barrel of
oil.

Now in the face of this strictly artificial, politically-induced
shortage of energy, as we have so many times before, we're hearing all
of the same old tired ideas from pundits who ignore both the actual
causes of the mess we're in, and actual solutions that we should be
pursuing.

There's a reason for that.

Never, ever forget that the "dominant culture", the elitists who
mistakenly believe they own this civilization (and do control most of
its papers, magazines, TV, and radio stations), are not enthusiasts
for the private automobile. They adore the current price of gas and
fervently hope it will go higher. They figure that will deprive us of
our individual mobility (and privacy) and force us all onto their
nasty, smelly, dirty buses and their even nastier little toy trains.
In any case, whatever "solutions" they propose, they are not going
to make things any better, not from the viewpoint of the Productive
Class.

One thing that all of their solutions have in common, whether it
happens to be windmills, solar panels, fuel cells, ethanol made from
corn or sugar cane, or synthetic fuel made from ethanol and other
thingsall of the ugly women in the room I mentioned earlieris
that they will make existing corporations richer. One reason petroleum
companies continue to reject the abiotic theory is that, if petroleum
is the second most abundant liquid on the planet, it will eventually
become impossible to justify selling gasoline for more than a dollar a
gallon.

Meanwhile, the only pretty girl in the room goes on being ignored
for exactly the same reason. She may be the sweet, perfect answer to
the prayers of every lonely man (or thirsty engine) in the world, but
she can't promise a devalued dime to any of the villains of this
piece.

Her proper name is "thermal depolymerization", a cheap, simple,
proven process by which organic garbageany organic garbagecan
be converted into usable fuel, more or less indistinguishable from
"light sweet crude". The company that came up with the process said it
can be done for fifteen dollars a barrel. With inevitable improvements
and economies of scale, they expected that price to fall to eight
dollars.

As a side-benefit that may prove as historically significant as
fuelling our economy, thermal depolymerization will solve another
problem: what do we do with our garbage? On the east coast, they take
it out on barges (I've seen it in the movies) and dump it in the oceanunless
they just let it pile up between buildings (I've seen that
in movies, too). Out west, we make mountains out of prairie dog holes,
altering our topography with vast landfills authorities hope will go
away ultimately on the Bishop Berkeley principle: out of sight, out of
existence.

Of course all that was before their first full-scale operation,
next door to the Butterball turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, was
discovered to have thousands of defective welds in its miles of pipinga
clear case, either of unbelievably massive imcompetence or
calculated sabotage, you decideButterball raised whatever price it
was charging for something they'd ordinarily have trouble disposing
of, and the governor of the state shut the plant down because it was
"smelly".

Smellier than a turkey-processing plant?

Oh, I get it: smellier than a turkey-processing plant that pays
its bribespardon me, campaign contributionsfully and on
time.

It doesn't help that the thermal depolymerization companynot
owned by libertarians, I guesshas busied itself lately looking for
government handouts. I haven't kept up, but I heard a while back that
they were planning to move their operation to another state. I don't
know if it would help them to move to another country. Somehow I
suspect that government ninjas working for various friends of Pinky
and the Brain might just move in and start breaking things and killing
people.

"The spice must flow"but only from authorized sources.

Which is more or less where I'd come to in my thinking when an
idea occurred to me. It's a horrible idea, I don't like it, and I'm
certainly not proud of having had it. But it's an idea that might just
throw a simian spanner right into the middle of all of this tidy
machinery designed to process the Productive Class like Butterball
turkeys.

Tired of three dollar gas?

Don't wanna pay four, five, or ten?

Then lend me your metaphorical ear.

If I were not a libertariana philosophical anarchist, at thatI
would propose a new law, to be introduced into state legislatures
all over the country. This new law would mandate that, whenever the
price of gasoline rose above a certain figure (the committee debates
on that item alone would be hilarious to watch) then the legislature
would purchase the appropriate intellectual property rights and build
a thermal depolymerization plant in each and every county in that
state.

If I were not a libertarian.

The figure I had in mind was a dollar.

Let me restate that succinctly. If the price of gas rose above a
buck, the state would build thermal depolymerization plants in every
county.

And I know, it's already way above a buck.

Now the encouraging fact is that this law doesn't actually have to
pass, in order to make those who have blocked the wheels of progress
back off. If enough people talk about it in the media that the badguys
don't controlprimarily the Internet and some talk radioif it's
introduced in enough legislatures by the minority of square-peggers
always to be found there, things will mysteriously start getting
better.

Clearly, we have entered a time of massive, sweeping political
changes, with all sides shifting alliances and everything up for
grabs. The Establishment is just barely keeping the whole thing
suppressed just now, but their holdwitness the Ron Paul campaignis
beginning to weaken. A proposal like this could ride the wave of
those changes, sweeping old things away, clearing the field for new
things.

Don't let this become one of those things that you'll realize, ten
years from now, that I was right about. I hate that when it happens.
Think of it as a sort of national truth or dare campaignor, better
yet, the libertarian version of mutual assured destruction. Sure, we
damage ourselves by proposing itor even by persuading Democrats
and Republicans to propose itbut we can take our enemies down with
us.

And the price of gas will be something we can live with again.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The
American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach,
Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,
Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website
"The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel
Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a
literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the
epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo"
May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The
Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was
published by BigHead Press
www.bigheadpress.com
has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at
www.Amazon.com,
or at BillOfRightsPress.com.